ECS do Core 2 with ATI and NV and dance with 512MiB
ECS didn't hold a booth inside the main halls at Computex this year, instead taking up a suite in the New York, New York building just next door. Along with their range of PMP products and digital home stuff, including many an Intel Viiv system, it was their Core 2 core logic demonstrations and new graphics boards that tickled the fancies of this hack.Displaying Core 2 Duo boards sporting NVIDIA nForce5 and ATI RD600 core logic, it's clear Intel's new CPU will have decent support on the mainboard front when it finally arrives. With many AMD users used to the quality of ATI and NVIDIA core logic, it seems logical that if they want to switch to Core 2 Duo in the future, using a logic vendor they have faith and existing experience in seems like a decent thing to do.
On the graphics front, ECS have a couple of interesting SKUs on display ready for when they finally launch to retail later this year. Putting 512MiB of memory on 7900 GT and 7600 GS is a decent way to increase performance on both, and with non-reference coolers to boot, they look worth a closer look when we can get our hands on them.
RD600 is ATI's first Core 2-supporting core logic, supplying 8 lanes of PCIe to each graphics slot in Crossfire mode and running with the just-released SB600 southbridge. nForce5 for Intel should carry over everything that makes it so good for AMD processors.
